What is Faith?

Jesuit philosopher Bernard Lonergan states that "Faith is knowledge born of religious love." Faith is a way of knowing. Faith is a way of finding within the resources of our own cognitional structure (i.e., the ways our heads and hearts function) the ways to hope and healing, the means to life and liberty, the sources of courage and compassion. Faith frees us to be who and what we deeply and truly desire to be. Faith connects us to the love that structures reality, and empowers us to be conduits of that love in all we desire and in all we do.

We need Faith, not ideology.

Nov. 6, 2004

In the wake of the election, we need some serious discussion about what constitutes faith (our relationship to the mystery God is) and ideology (a closed set of self-serving ideas, justifying one's, or a community's, place in a social structure).

Too many of the people who voted from a faith based perspective were really serving ideologies of one kind or another. The tragic, sad and scary aspect of our being unable to delineate and distinguish the difference between faith and ideology, is that the vast majority of those basically good willed people, who are sincerely trying to follow and serve God by voting from a faith perspective, have no awareness of what their vote does to bolster various ideological energies and positions.

"Most people know what they do. Most people know why they do what they do. What most people don't know is what what they do does" - Michel Foucault

Peace,

Rick Malloy, S.J. (rickmalloysj@hotmail.com)